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Abstract
The concept of personhood has been central to bioethics debates about abortion, the treatment of patients in a vegetative or minimally conscious states, as well as patients with advanced dementia. More recently, the concept has been employed to think about new questions related to human-brain organoids, artificial intelligence, uploaded minds, human-animal chimeras, and human embryos, to name a few. A common move has been to ask what these entities have in common with persons (in the normative sense), and then draw conclusions about what we do (or do not) owe them. This paper argues that at best the concept of “personhood” is unhelpful to much of bioethics today and at worst it is harmful and pernicious. I suggest that we (bioethicists) stop using the concept of personhood and instead ask normative questions more directly (e.g., how ought we to treat this being and why?) and use other philosophical concepts (e.g., interests, sentience, recognition respect) to help us answer them. It is time for bioethics to end talk about personhood.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank the participants in the Houston Philosophical Bioethics Workshop (2022) for their helpful comments on this paper: Sean Aas, Anne Barnill, Gwen Bradford, Dan Brudney, Jessica Flanigan, Matthew Liao, Ryan Nelson, and Wayne Sumner. I also thank the participants in the Greenwall Faculty Scholars Program Philosophical Bioethics Works-In-Progress Group (2022): Sean Aas, Brent Kious, Maria Merritt, Govind Persad, and Andrew Peterson. Any flaws in the arguments are my own, not theirs. Views are my own.
FUNDING
The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.
Notes
1 See also Fletcher Citation1998 for this essay. Emphasis mine.
2 Emphasis mine.
3 By which Fletcher means personhood.
4 Jeff McMahan, for example, has argued for similar views (that those with severe cognitive impairments fall below the threshold level for personhood) in The Ethics of Killing and other publications, as Eva Kittay points out in “At the Margins of Moral Personhood,” see Kittay Citation2005, 101.
5 It is important not to confuse concepts of personal identity and personhood. We may very well think that an individual with advanced dementia is no longer the same self (personal identity) but that is different from saying that they are a “non-person” which is my focus here.
6 Sesha is Kittay’s daughter who has, as Kittay describes it, a significant mental disability.
7 For more detailed argument on the moral and epistemological relevance of personal experience in bioethics debates, see Nelson et al. Citation2022.
8 As Clarke and Savulescu Citation2021 note, we may soon enter an era of “post-persons”—non-human beings with superior cognitive capacities to “ours” who may even be capable of more accurate and consistent moral reasoning than the sort that is prized and thought to be distinctive of humans (9–10). See also, Schuklenk Citation2021.
9 See also Davis and Steinbock Citation1994; DeGrazia Citation2020; Todorovic Citation2021.
10 See also Shepherd Citation2021. Some might be concerned that this view implies that patients with UWS (formerly PVS) have no moral status since they are not welfare subjects. But, we might think that given the uncertainty around diagnosis of patients in the UWS state (the literature indicates we were wrong in about 40% of cases where we thought there was no consciousness but there actually was or came to be some minimal consciousness) this gives us reason not to draw the conclusion that patients in a UWS ought to be considered to have no moral status. Moreover, moral status simply refers to a being having interests for its own sake—but there might be other reasons to treat (or not treat) patients in a UWS in certain ways—e.g., out of respect for their families and for their families’ interests.
11 Some philosophers (e.g., Gwen Bradford) think that even non-sentient beings such as conscious, rational, but affectless robots have interests insofar as they have goals and plans that can be achieved or thwarted. For me, it is hard to imagine that there are interests without [any] feeling or affect. Here, I’ll recommend that the reader watch the movie I’m Your Man (2021). This film features Tom, a very human looking robot who uses deep machine learning in his interactions with humans to respond to them in emotionally and socially intelligent ways. So much so that his love interest, Alma (a Berlin based anthropologist tasked with spending three weeks with him as part of a research experiment to inform a decision about whether robots should have rights), comes to fall in love with him. Tom has belief like states, desire like states, and can decide and act. It is not clear if Tom is sentient (if he actually has affectively valanced experiences). If he feels nothing (e.g., when Alma is mean to him) then it’s unclear how he has an interest (e.g., in not being wronged).
12 Interestingly, DeGrazia takes the view that beings who are reasonably expected to become sentient have interests that should be protected as if they are already sentient (DeGrazia Citation2021, 47).
13 Clarke and Savulescu Citation2021 also references Singer Citation2009. Note DeGrazia Citation2021 also adopts this view.
14 He also uses the term personhood here (persons are one type of being that have these so-called special interests and resulting rights). I obviously think this is a mistake. Also, interestingly, DeGrazia takes the view that beings who are reasonably expected to become persons (defined as self-awareness with narrative identity) have these special interests and rights that should be protected (47).
15 I thank Dan Brudney for this point.
16 Political, legal, moral and historical philosophers might still have good reasons to engage with and use the concept of “persons” in some contexts (e.g., Kantian moral philosophy, responsibility theory, metaphysics). Some of this use might be pragmatic (e.g., there is a rich history of the concept). I intend to remain agnostic about whether the concept is necessary in other contexts such as these—although my intuition is that other concepts such as “moral agent” would suffice in many instances. Even for committed [neo-] Kantians such as Christine Korsgaard, personhood is not (or need not) be the entire or main moral story. See Korsgaard Citation2021.
17 Taken verbatim from Lindemann Citation2014.
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